MoleBot Lives Under Your Coffee Table, Plays Games

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Spending a lonely day at home? Perhaps a robotic mole, living
underneath your coffee table, can keep you company. Media design
researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and
Technology in South Korea have created a table that has a small
molehill that glides along the surface and plays games on the
tabletop. The researchers first showed
their so-called MoleBot at SIGGRAPH, a graphics and
interactive conference, in August 2011. It won the grand prize at
the French virtual reality conference Laval Virtual, on March 30.

The surface of the MoleBot table is covered with more than 15,000
hexagonal pins, packed side by side like cells in a honeycomb so
they make a smooth, silver surface. As the MoleBot moves
underneath the pins, it makes a molehill that glides along
underneath the pins, so it looks like a mysterious animal running
underneath a silver cloth. A layer of spandex between the MoleBot
and the pins reduces friction, helping the bot move up to 16
inches (40 centimeters) a second, according to the
paper the researchers submitted to SIGGRAPH.

Remember that kindergarten demonstration of how magnets work?
Kids can move one magnet around on the surface of a table without
directly touching it, if they drag it along using another magnet
held underneath the table. The MoleBot uses the same principle to
move. The plastic bot on the surface of the table, underneath the
pins, has a strong
neodymium magnet inside. A neodymium magnetic stage
underneath the table drags the bot along invisibly. Users control
the stage with a joystick or with gestures that a depth camera
detects.

The results are surprisingly appealing and probably tell a lot
about people's capacity to anthropomorphize anything small and
round that moves. The MoleBot can push little spools along its
pin tabletop or attract and drag magnetic objects placed on the
table. The researchers created tiny white trees that hold round
magnetic apples the MoleBot gathers when it passes the trees. The
robotic molehill can play "MoleBot soccer" by fighting over a
ball with a small, two-wheeled RollBot the researchers made. With
the depth-detecting camera, users can call the MoleBot over by
presenting it with a large lollipop or have it follow their
hands.

"It could be a new game interface, in which people build a small
world on a table," the researchers wrote in their abstract for
SIGGRAPH.